Saturday, January 14, 2017

While an anthology of Daney in English remains a distant dream, the rest of the speaking world continues to publish translations. After books in Spanish, German, Dutch, Japanese, Italian and others, the Portuguese publisher Angelus Novus released last year a selection of Daney's writings: O Cinema Que Faz Escrever: textos críticos. The translators have sent over the table of contents which you can read below with links to existing (English) translations.

Choosing these 26 texts must have presented the obvious headache (the French edition of Daney's complete writings run into nearly 3,000 pages) but this small selection hits the spot in many ways. The book opens with 'The tracking shot in Kapo' - Daney's last and most encompassing text, covering his life as a cinephile in relation to modern cinema - and ends with 'Montage Obligatory' - one of the key texts written while watching the first Gulf War on TV and which made Daney abandon "traditional" criticism and found the more literary review Trafic.

In-between are the best known theoretical texts from the 70s (most of them already translated in English), a few great film reviews of international authors (e.g. Rossellini, Mizoguchi, Paradjanov), and a pretty perfect selection of Daney's key texts from the late 80s and early 90s where he developed his opposition between the image and the visual (including "The last image" from the landmark exhibition "Passages du cinéma"). I particularly like the short section called "The Portuguese pole" with three reviews of films by Reis/Cordeiro, Oliveira and Rocha, as if Daney's many travels and writings on international cinema allowed any country in the world to create a small Daney collection of their own.